Taking payment on a car deal is more than simply transferring funds. These days dealers are asking their payments partners to handle compliance and give real-time visibility into cash flow. They also want support for a growing list of payment types beyond credit and debit cards. Priority Commerce Automotive (formerly Dealer Merchant Services) says it’s built to meet those demands, processing more than $160 billion in payments volume while giving dealers a single command center to manage cash flow across departments and rooftops.
Tom Priore, Chairman and CEO of Priority Commerce, and Amberly Allen, Managing Partner of Priority Commerce Automotive, join us on this episode of Inside Automotive with a closer look at the shifting landscape of payment processing, compliance, and the automotive financial ecosystem.
Visibility across every department, every location
Modern automotive commerce goes beyond accepting credit and debit cards, according to Priore. Dealers need visibility into cash flow across every department, particularly service, which now accounts for roughly half of the average dealership’s gross profit.
"You want to have visibility to cash flow across all of your departments, particularly service, which is now 50 percent of the average dealership's gross profit," – Tom Priore
A single command center gives CFOs and controllers visibility into money coming in across every department and every location, seven days a week, including weekends and holidays.
From that same command center, they can pay bills and invest excess cash flow to optimize financial performance at the dealership level.
Fragmented systems and limited insight into daily cash positions are common complaints from controllers, Allen said. Cash flow can swing significantly within just a few days across a dealership’s departments and locations.
Streamlining surcharges & compliance
Surcharging remains a significant piece of Priority Commerce Automotive’s business, and scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has raised the stakes for dealers who haven’t implemented it correctly. A majority of dealers are either not surcharging or not doing so within regulatory guidelines, Allen said, citing JD Power data.
Priority Commerce Automotive built a compliance assessment to help dealers evaluate their surcharging programs against current rules. State and brand-level requirements add another layer of complexity, and the platform is designed to work across those differences. California prohibits surcharging in the finance department entirely, while some luxury brands avoid surcharging in service and parts departments.
Priority Commerce Automotive’s platform allows dealers to apply surcharging selectively by department or by store within the same group. Allen pointed to a 12-store luxury group as an example, where one store avoids surcharging altogether because of manufacturer preference while the rest of the group can choose department by department.
Priority Commerce Automotive’s “universal wallet”
Consumer demand for alternative payment methods is pushing dealers toward services like Venmo, PayPal, Cash App and cryptocurrency, Allen said.
"The great thing is having it all in one place, one deposit as opposed to having a relationship with all those different type companies." – Amberly Allen
Consolidating those payment types into a single deposit, rather than maintaining separate relationships with each provider, is at the center of Priority Commerce Automotive’s approach. The company calls the expanded set of payment options a “universal wallet.”
Reconciling multiple payment types creates additional demands on the back end, according to Priore. Automating that reconciliation, alongside the cash flow visibility features already built into the platform, is central to how Priority Commerce Automotive handles the added complexity.
Programmable cash flow control
Flexibility extends to how dealers manage incoming cash flow, according to Priore. Controllers and accounting teams can set rules for how much cash to retain versus how much to sweep into traditional bank accounts, turning what was once a manual process into a programmable one.
“It really provides a tool set to controllers and the accounting team, up to the CFO, that they can program in a way that fits their business,” Priore said.
That same flexibility carries over to surcharging decisions, where dealers can apply different rules store by store or department by department depending on brand and market. Priore described the approach as letting dealers “choose your adventure” within a single platform.
Additionally, Priore addressed how potential federal cryptocurrency legislation remains uncertain, and that uncertainty requires technology providers to stay adaptable rather than commit to a single approach. “We just don’t know what they’re going to be,” Priore said. “It’s incumbent upon technology providers like us to just remain flexible, agile. There’s just uncertainty as to how it’s going to evolve and resolve itself. But we need to handle them all.”
Anticipating changes in the payments landscape and building systems before dealers need them, Priore said, is central to Priority Commerce Automotive’s role with automotive specialists, then implementing those systems inside individual stores. Ultimately, Priority Commerce Automotive’s surcharging track record has saved the dealer body more than $110 million over more than 20 years. According to Allen, the next phase of the company’s work centers on bringing that same savings approach to the broader financial ecosystem dealers manage day-to-day.
